The present invention relates to a personal imaging system, and more specifically to power and processor management for a personal imaging system.
Personal imaging systems are wearable computers. Personal imaging systems may use an optical head-mounted display (OHMD) or computerized internet-connected glasses with transparent heads-up display (HUD) or augmented reality (AR) overlay that has the capability of reflecting projected digital images, which can be seen through by the user.
The personal imaging system may collect information from internal or external sensors. Some of the sensors may track movement of the user's gaze or head, acceleration, temperature, pupil movement, facial expression, and other conditions which can use significant processing power. Input to the personal imaging system may be accomplished through buttons, touchpad, compatible devices for remote control, speech recognition of commands issued by the user, gesture recognition, eye tracking and brain-computer interface.
Additionally, the personal imaging system may control, or retrieve data from, other instruments or computers, for example through wireless radio technologies. The personal imaging system may also contain a storage device.
It should be noted that connecting the personal imaging system to another device via wireless radio technologies uses significant electrical power from both the personal imaging system and the device in which it is connected to. This can be problematic if the data collection is longer than a few hours.
One example in which data collection is used for an extended period of time is for mobile application usability testing. Usability testing is used to determine actual user experience when the user interacts with the application on a mobile device. Since the data provided by users sitting in an artificial setting in which a document camera is pointed directly at the user's face can be skewed depending on the level of comfort by the user, instead personal imaging systems have been used to obtain data from a user. The usability data is provided by information from motion sensors, microphones, environmental sensors and optical sensors of the personal imaging system. However, in order to obtain this data regarding usability, the user has to manually start and stop the usability testing which can also skew the data collected. Furthermore, the personal imaging system has to be connected to and synced with the mobile device in which the application is displayed in order to correlate the data collection with specific portions of the application being tested which uses significant power and processing resources of both the personal imaging device and mobile device.